Wednesday, September 14, 2016

I work at a camera store and one of the popular items we sell is battery
chargers just like this one. For a year and a half, we’d sell these and
wonder how people could lose their chargers. Many people come down to
Miami on vacation and leave the chargers at home. (Or come back from
vacation and realize that they’ve left the charger somewhere in
California.) Others buy the just camera from a pawn shop or receive it
as a hand-me-down and need to get accessories.

Either way, I
found myself constantly “misplacing” the wires for my Fuji F10. This
includes the wire to transfer the pictures to the computer and the wire
to hook the camera up to an outlet so that the camera could charge.
That’s why I got memory card readers built into my computer. It’s also
why I eventually broke down and bought this charger.

To start,
it normally retails for $30. It’s not bad considering that it’s a
generic charger and charges several other Fuji batteries. This works out
well if you have several other Fuji cameras that use the proprietary
batteries. (We’ve had at least one customer that was able to take
advantage of this with the Canon charger.)

Here comes the
confusing part. There are several plates that fit into the body of the
charger. You have to figure out which one goes with your battery, and
then fit that one on to the base, which goes into the wall or hooks up
to the car charger adapter. Your battery then comes out of the camera
and fits into the plate.

Many customers don’t seem to get
this. I don’t think it has to do with the customer. It’s just hard to
explain while the unit is still inside the packaging. That’s why we will
often set up the charger for the customer. We’ve had many people come
back saying that it doesn’t work, only to finally get it when we set it
up.

The charger works well, at least in the house. (Since I
don’t have a car, I don’t really have an opportunity to use the car
charger.) The only drawback is that, like I said, you have to take the
battery out of the camera. This means that the camera will lose power
and you’ll have to reset a lot of things.

This wasn’t a big
deal for me. It meant resetting only the time and date. However, they
make these for batteries that are used in dSLR cameras, which do have a
lot of settings. (I’m not sure if that applies to this particular model,
as we don’t carry a lot of the Fuji SLR cameras.)

It’s
definitely handy to have. It’s too bad that there’s no one else in the
house with a Fuji proprietary battery, as I’m willing to share. However,
this is going to be useful when I go on a trip. This is much harder to
lose than a cord.